Attentional processes are the brain’s way of shining a searchlight on relevant stimuli and filtering out the rest. Neuroscientists want to determine the circuits that aim and power that searchlight. For decades, their studies have revolved around the cortex, the folded structure on the outside of the brain commonly associated with intelligence and higher-order cognition. It’s become clear that activity in the cortex boosts sensory processing to enhance features of interest.
But now, some researchers are trying a different approach, studying how the brain suppresses information rather than how it augments it. Perhaps more importantly, they’ve found that this process involves more ancient regions much deeper in the brain — regions not often considered when it comes to attention.
The melancholy realism with which Patchett draws out the unrealised potential of her characters feels downright un-American, yet her storytelling is leavened by moments of grace and reconciliation. Both victory and defeat, after all, peter out to nothing in the end. Indelibly poignant in its long unspooling perspective on family life, The Dutch House brilliantly captures how time undoes all certainties.
While the topics are adventurous, the nonfiction collection tackles the all-too-human topic of yearning and its oft-corollary, obsession. Both gurgle beneath the writer’s sonorous and captivating prose.
He makes the point that even if his illness is uncommon, his destination is shared: “Unlike you, perhaps, I know I am dying. And because of that I fear it less.” He approaches his plight with a curiosity that rises above self-pity. Although he can no longer take part in family life as he once did, he never disappears into illness (as many do). And the book itself keeps him connected. What one notices throughout is the ascendancy of the writing: fit and unaffected and strong.
Russia is famous for ballet, but it was a Frenchman who shaped Russian classical dance as we know it today. Marius Petipa (1818–1910) emigrated from France to St. Petersburg in 1847 and worked in the Imperial theaters until the end of his life. During the second half of the 19th century, Petipa’s choreographic classicism replaced the dominant Romantic style and laid the groundwork for 20th-century modernism in dance. Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the great Soviet Russian ballet theaters, and George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet all stemmed from Petipa.
The lineage of Petipa to various 20th-century ballet masters and institutions frames Nadine Meisner’s Marius Petipa: The Emperor’s Ballet Master. Meisner shows how indebted Russian ballet (and, as a result, ballet globally) is to Petipa: “This is the style, exciting yet refined,” she writes,